While Adobe is best known to Mac users for its Creative Suite products, the company is no stranger to the world of high-end audio. One of those applications, called Soundbooth, has exceeded the company’s expectations with feedback from users since Adobe released a public beta last October.
“It’s been fantastic,” Hart Shafer, Adobe’s Senior Manager of Audio Products, told Macworld at the NAMM trade show for the music and audio industry. “There was clearly a lot of pent up demand for a product like this.”
Adobe said that demand for the audio application has been great so far and that it’s close to reaching the 100,000-download mark since Soundbooth’s October introduction.
Shafer said that Soundbooth was designed from the ground up with the video and Web workflow in mind. While many professionals have to be able to manipulate audio, they don’t necessarily need the vast feature set that many high-end audio applications offer.
It is the creative pro market where Adobe says Soundbooth differs from Apple’s SoundTrack Pro audience.
“They aren’t using the applications in the same way,” said Shafer. “The reason we built Soundbooth is that creative pros didn’t feel the other audio apps were built for them. Most audio apps produce music, but our customers wanted something to help clean up audio and make it sound better.”
Shafer said he has seen some of the projects and different ways that customers have been using Soundbooth and has been impressed. People from all of the Creative Pro markets have utilized the application in a variety of ways.
“It’s not just for video people, but also Dreamweaver and Flash users who need to post audio on their Web sites,” said Shafer. “It’s really something for all Creative Pros.”
Soundbooth is not Adobe’s only audio application. The company also makes Audition, a high-end audio application for creating music. With Adobe’s re-entry into the Mac video-editing market with Premiere and the head-to-head battle between Aperture and Lightroom, is there any chance Adobe will take on Apple’s GarageBand and Logic Pro?
“Never say never,” Shafer said. “We certainly are getting a lot of requests, and we will continue to monitor those in the future.”